Converting language names to ISO 639 language codes

Question

I need to convert language names like 'Hungarian', 'English' to ISO 639 codes. ISO 639-6 would be the best but ISO 639-2 is good enough. What's the best way to achieve this?

I should convert the English to locale and get the language with getLanguage()? If thats the only way how can I convert a string like 'English' to a java locale?

My goal is to store book language info using the ISO 639 codes.

Answer 1

You can get a list of ISO 639-2 codes by passing a regular expression of language names to LanguageAlpha3Code.findByName(String) (in nv-i18n library).

The following example code is a command-line tool that converts given language names into corresponding ISO 639-2 codes.

import java.util.List;
import com.neovisionaries.i18n.LanguageAlpha3Code;

public class To639_2
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        // For each language name given on the command line.
        for (String languageName : args)
        {
            // Get a list of ISO 639-2 codes (alpha-3 codes)
            // whose language name matches the given pattern.
            List<LanguageAlpha3Code> list
                = LanguageAlpha3Code.findByName(languageName);

            // Print the language and the ISO 639-2 code.
            System.out.format("%s => %s\n", languageName,
                (list.size() != 0) ? list.get(0) : "");
        }
    }
}

A sample execution:

$ java -cp nv-i18n-1.14.jar:. To639_2 Hungarian English
Hungarian => hun
English => eng